The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum »

Geoffrey Wolff is the author of five works of nonfiction and six novels. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Bath, Maine.

A masterful biographer now offers a thrilling, definitive portrait of one of history’s most legendary icons of adventure.

In 1860, sixteen-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. Despite having only a third-grade education, Slocum rose through the nautical ranks at a mercurial pace; just a decade later he was commander of his own ship. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Francisco, and Australia—where he met and married his first wife, Virginia, who would sail along with him for the rest of her life, bearing and raising their children at sea. He commanded eight vessels and owned four, enduring hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, a mutiny, and the death of his wife and three of his children. Yet his ultimate adventure and crowning glory was still to come.

In 1895 Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts—by himself—in the Spray, a small sloop of thirty-seven feet. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated until 1925. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, soon made him internationally famous. He met President Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions and became a presence on the lecture circuit, selling his sea-saga books whenever and wherever he could. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—and was never seen again.

Geoffrey Wolff captures this singular life and its flamboyant times—from the Golden Age of Sail to a shockingly different new century—in vivid, fascinating detail.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Sailing Alone is one of the best books ever written about the call of the running tide. On its last page Slocum boasted, "No king, no country, no treasury at all, was taxed for the voyage of the Spray, and she accomplished all that she undertook to do." Geoffrey Wolff has done the same. His every page drives us back to a book he rightly characterizes in his first line as "a tour de force of descriptive and narrative power." Read Sailing Alone. Then read The Hard Way Around. You'll want to reread Sailing Alone. I can think of no greater praise for Geoffrey Wolff.

Part One Sailing into the World

Prologue The Tales He Could Have Told 3

One Unafraid of a Capful of Wind 7

Two Coming Aboard Through the Hawse-Hole 13

Three Master Slocum 33

Four Love Stories 47

Five Enterprises 61

Six Northern Light 77

Seven Mutiny 87

Eight Stranding 113

Part Two Sailing Around It

Nine Salvage 131

Ten Destroyer and Poverty Point 141

Eleven The Great Adventure 157

Twelve What Came After 191

Acknowledgments 215

Bibliography of Sources Cited 217